For as long as I can remember we have had a couple of photo albums that belonged to my grandfather, Percy Wynn Hayes (1874-1948). As they are now more than 100 years old, the photos are beginning to fade, and the albums’ bindings are beginning to disintegrate.

So the time has come to make digital scans of them, before they fade any more. The problem is that a series of images on a hard disk don’t tell you very much, and so I’ve been putting it off.

But now I have begun using the Evernote notetaking program, and it seems to be the ideal tool for this kind of thing.

I scan the photos in tiff format with the program that came with our printer/scanner, and then edit them with Irfanview to try to compensate for some of the fading. I then make a smaller, compressed jpeg copy (keeping the tiff one for archival purposes).

I press Ctrl-C on the jpeg version in Irfanview, to copy the image, and Ctrl-V in a new note in Evernote, and the picture is there. I give it a title, and some tags so that I can find it again. Then I type underneath the picture anything that my grandfather wrote in the album. He often didn’t.

Here’s one of the pictures:

He didn’t write anything under that picture, so I’ve just given it the title “Five mounted soldiers”. But at least it is preserved, and can’t fade any more. And even the reduced jpeg copies, copied into Evernote, are bigger than the pictures in the original album.

So I’m quite chuffed with Evernote. It can do lots of different things, but one of the things it excels at is compiling a digital photo album.

If you’d like to see how Evernote prints a report (ie an album) of the first few pictures I added, click here to see the Evernote.pdf file it produced. You just select the “notes” you want included, and then print the album, which you can then send to other family members, etc. That way everyone can share grandpa’s photo album.

When I’ve finished scanning them, I might donate the originals to a museum somewhere. My mother sometimes threatened to do that, but I’m glad she didn’t, because back then we didn’t have the technology to make decent copies that we could keep.